The Winterlings

by Cristina Sanchez-Andrade

  ‘Did you call the doctor?’

  ‘Of course! He won’t take long to come, you’ll see.’

  ‘I’m not ready to kick the bucket yet.’

  ‘You won’t kick anything.’

  ‘Dolores …’

  Saladina was still rigid, sitting up in bed and staring straight ahead.

  ‘What, Sala — what?’

  ‘Don’t go away again without me.’

  ‘No.’

  But Saladina was already crawling over her sister’s bed, making her way towards the thighs, kissing the navel and the breasts, the armpit salty like the sea.

  ‘The house is falling down around us.’

  ‘…’

  Days later, the doctor from Sanclás appeared. That morning, Saladina was awake. Seeing him walk through the door, she began to tremble like a rabbit. The doctor asked Dolores how long she’d been like that, and Dolores said that she’d been complaining about her stomach for some time now. She also commented that she thought it might be due to the figs.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked the doctor, addressing Saladina.

  Saladina twisted the sheets between her sweaty hands.

  ‘You tell me! That’s what doctors are for, aren’t they?’

  The doctor closed his eyes for a few seconds, as if stopping himself from taking the bait.

  ‘I’ll put it another way. What symptoms have you noticed?’

  ‘Pain,’ she said. ‘It’s because my guts are loose.’

  ‘Quite,’ replied the doctor.

  ‘Sometimes some of them travel up to my gullet, and I can barely breathe,’ added Saladina, feeling very important with all this attention.

  ‘Some of what?’

  ‘My guts,’ she clarified. ‘And they cause little choking fits, you see?’

  The doctor looked for his stethoscope in his doctor’s bag.

  ‘Can I ask you something, doctor?’ asked Saladina while he listened to her breathing.

  ‘Ask away …’

  ‘What’s happening to me now …’ — she fixed her feverish pupils on his — ‘could it have anything to do with a kiss?’

  ‘With a what?’

  ‘With a kiss.’

  ‘Your abdominal pain?’

  Saladina had the expectant look of someone waiting for an answer. She clicked her tongue like she used to when she had false teeth.

  ‘No. Abdominal pain has nothing to do with kissing.’

  Saladina let out a large sigh.

  ‘And is it contagious?’

  ‘No, it’s not contagious.’

  Saladina let out another sigh.

  The doctor asked her more questions. Before he left, he spoke with Dolores in the doorway. Saladina would live a while longer, but she wouldn’t get better. Stomach cancer was one of the worst illnesses. There was no treatment for it.

  When the doctor left, Dolores went back up to the bedroom. She found Saladina looking much more calm.

  ‘What else did the doctor tell you, Dolores?’

  Dolores’ legs were shaking. She could barely think.

  ‘Nothing else. Just that you’ll get better soon. You just need a bit more bed rest.’

  ‘More bed rest? My arse will get big.’

  A wave of sadness rolled over Dolores’ eyes.

  ‘You’ve got a lovely arse.’

  Shortly after, while Saladina was taking her siesta, Mr Tenderlove knocked at the door. He said that the doctor from Sanclás had gone by his house to have a molar looked at, and had told him the news about Saladina.

  ‘I’m truly sorry,’ he added.

  ‘Sure …’ said Dolores, not wanting to open the door fully.

  The pair of them stood in silence.

  ‘You two should never have come back,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘But we did,’ she said, surprised by his comment. ‘We can’t turn back time now.’

  ‘There is … There is a way,’ said Tenderlove.

  Dolores opened the door a little more.

  ‘All the village wants is to forget,’ he continued. ‘I know that your grandfather kept those contracts. If you hand them over to me, this will be over once and for all.’

  Dolores thought it over. Then she summoned the courage to do what she’d been thinking they ought to do for a while now. She set out for the orchard, followed by Mr Tenderlove. She brushed off the chickens scratching around there with a boot, and crouched down under the fig tree. With her hands, she dug up a wooden chest that she handed over to the dental mechanic.

  ‘Is your fire lit?’ he asked, looking fixedly at the chest as he took it in his shaking hands.

  The fire was lit, and they went back into the house. In front of the hearth, Tenderlove opened the chest with solemnity. The metal hinges were rusted over, but at last they were able to pull out a wad of tied-up envelopes that gave off a strong stench of earth and mould. One by one, with a look of disdain, he pulled them out and threw them in the fire. In barely a second, the envelopes opened up like the petals of a flower, then twisted and danced in the air before dwindling down. They began to turn away when suddenly, through the open door, a gust of wind blew in. The shreds of paper that had burnt in the fire went up through the chimney and into the sky. Tenderlove and the Winterling went out into the orchard. Now the bits of paper floated down to the ground only to fly back up again, fluttering like tiny grey butterflies and settling on the trees, the fence posts, the pile of dry gorse in the square, and on the tiled roofs of the houses of Tierra de Chá.

  ‘It’s raining,’ said Uncle Rosendo to his wife, looking at the sky from the other end of town, when they both went outside to look.

  ‘Look, you dummy,’ the Widow replied, astonished by the spectacle of the little grey papers, resting her hand instinctively on her belly. ‘Can’t you see they’re butterflies?’

  Rosendo squinted and looked again.

  ‘They’re moths,’ he said.

  11

  It was a vague memory, melding in with the faces, gestures, and words of other men. Memory, always so wise, had silenced almost everything. Nevertheless, without realising it, the people of Tierra de Chá had resolved many of their doubts about the grandfather.

  A tall, strong, decisive man. A man with brilliant, nervous eyes the colour of the sea. A man with a thin and scratchy yellow beard. A man in corduroy pants and jacket, sometimes with a black tie. His pants were a brownish-grey, old, the corduroy worn away from the wiping of hands, with patches over the knees. His jacket had elbow patches and was too big for him. A handsome man, and pleasing to the eye with his weather-beaten skin.

  A good man (was he really good?) who was both a Christian and a communist. Interested in the sciences. At times, a man of darkness, it had been said. And stubborn. Something unknown moved inside him, like little roots entangled beneath the ground that have never seen the light of day, whose blind strength is the support for a beautiful plant of yellow flowers.

  Don Reinaldo was the root of the gorse bush.

  Gorse can be devastated by fire, pulled out by men, trampled by tractors, and yet it always sprouts again somewhere, time and time again, clinging onto the hillside or surviving next to the asphalt of the highway. That’s what he was: a blind strength out of which sprouted his wild delirium, his obsessions and eccentricities, and his youthful nostalgia. He had begun by studying medicine, but he’d never finished. There was his obstinate desire to control and manage everyone around him, to make decisions for everybody else, to know more and more. The mad business of buying brains was what truly led him to his death.

  Not long after Esperanza a la Puerta de Nicolasa died, there was cause for commotion in the village. The priest wanted to bury her immediately, but Don Reinaldo was set on keeping the body unburied for a few days. Cars and people in suits began to arrive in Ti
erra de Chá, mostly doctors from the Faculty of Medicine in Santiago. The Winterlings’ grandfather put them up in his house, and there they spent their days, cooped up drinking cognac and doing who knows what.

  A few of the villagers — the priest, Uncle Rosendo, and perhaps Tenderlove — confronted Don Reinaldo and demanded that the poor maid be buried. That was when he pulled out the contract for the sale of the brain, signed by the maid herself.

  Don Manuel told Dolores all of this one morning. In fact, the Winterling had gone to him to get some weight off her own chest. She couldn’t stop thinking about what had led them to seek refuge in this remote village, and Mr Tenderlove’s comment that they should never have returned … In the beginning, Saladina had always spoken as if she too were involved in the whole business. But lately, it seemed she wanted to distance herself from it. Dolores noticed that she was more and more scathing in her words.

  And now she was convinced that her sister’s illness had burst into their lives because of all this. And so one September morning, with birds flitting about her and awash with strange aromas, she went to the priest’s house. She found him eating breakfast by the stove. She said that she had come to confess, but that there was no need to go to the church.

  She told him that she couldn’t stand it anymore, that she had a secret that wasn’t just any old secret. It was about something dark and terrible, a secret she had wanted to reveal ever since they arrived in Tierra de Chá, but that she had never had the courage for. It was about something that oppressed her, as if she were wearing medical corsets. It was something she had to tell, she had to do it, although she knew that once she did tell it, things would never be the same because—

  ‘But what is it?’ shouted the priest, throwing down his fork and waving his hands in the air.

  So then Dolores confessed that she had been married to a certain Tomás, a fisherman of octopus and pout whiting from Santa Eugenia de Ribeira, just to escape the drudgery of routine and for the dream of leading a different life. But very soon, she discovered that not only was she not in love, but that her life was even more boring with him, she …

  ‘I can’t, Father. I can’t tell you any more …’

  Don Manuel moved his dish of fried eggs and chorizo to one side. Lately, he had no appetite, and having no appetite bored him immensely. He was about to start speaking again when, without knowing why, he caught himself thinking that that was exactly what he used to say to his own mother: ‘I can’t, I can’t tell you any more, mother …’ when she would ask him to tell her the secrets of all the people in the village.

  He realised then that just before he began eating his fried eggs, he had been thinking of his mother — of her reddened hand after she slammed it down on the wooden table in the kitchen that day a long time ago, and of the sound that it made, and of her words, ‘You will become a priest, and that’s the end of it! So it’s not a good idea for you to go around with women, women are bad, my little Manny …’

  ‘Have you come to confess that you abandoned your poor husband?’ he said suddenly.

  ‘No,’ answered the Winterling.

  He wanted to keep asking, but he knew that he couldn’t be too direct.

  ‘And … this Tomás … if he is your husband, and you didn’t abandon him, how is it that he is not here, with you?’

  The Winterling told him that she couldn’t tell him anything more, but that he shouldn’t worry about the octopus fisherman, because he was quite at peace now. At peace forever.

  The priest gulped.

  12

  Despite all the bed rest recommended by the doctor, Saladina was feeling weaker and weaker. Each step was an effort. She sat down at the kitchen table with an appetite, but soon her stomach turned. She barely ate, and the pain was so bad that it stopped her sleeping. Each morning, she got up feeling like her guts were loose, as she used to say. Dolores was completely devoted to her. Her life now took place next to her sister.

  She didn’t go up the mountain, she barely sewed, and she didn’t even drop by the tavern.

  She spent the whole day attending to Saladina, getting her to eat something and relieving her pain; she was constant in her dedication and patience.

  The illness had managed to sweeten Saladina’s character and make her serene. But strangely enough, this serenity was exactly what puzzled Dolores the most. This apathetic woman was not her sister. Her surly temperament, her fervour, her unpleasantness was what made Saladina who she was. The resignation with which she now arose every morning to be cared for worried Dolores, and even made her suspicious. Saladina had always been impetuous and ill tempered; she had always been the one to make decisions for both of them, but now she was just a rag doll. It seems like she’s just waiting for her time to come, thought Dolores.

  But one Monday in October, things seemed to take a turn. Just like every morning since she had returned from Tossa de Mar, Dolores went out to the orchard to see if the letter from Albert Lewin offering her a role in his next film had arrived.

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked Saladina.

  ‘To find my destiny within the four walls of the letterbox,’ replied Dolores with irony.

  But as always, there was nothing in the mailbox except cobwebs. Then she went to tend to Greta the cow, who was also growing weaker and weaker. When she was in the cowshed, she thought she heard a noise, and looked out the window.

  Wrapped in a black cape, her arms in the air, Violeta da Cuqueira advanced slowly towards the house. As she explained when she arrived, someone from the village, whose name she couldn’t reveal, had paid her to cure Saladina. Dolores got out the broom with the intention of beating her, but her sister, who had listened to the conversation from her bed, asked the witch to come up.

  With the distant serenity that characterised her, taking out two bowls from a hessian sack, the old woman explained that she had come to wash her down with rye bran, and give her a rub of pig fat. Hearing this, Saladina summoned the last of her strength and kicked off her covers, then pulled up her nightdress, leaving her stomach exposed.

  ‘I’m all yours, da Cuqueira,’ she said.

  The next morning, after she’d been scrubbed three times with rye bran and rubbed down five times with pig fat, Saladina woke up clicking her tongue like in the old days.

  She sat up on the bed, felt her stomach, and said that she felt like eating chorizo. Her sister advised against it, and brought instead a simple broth. She didn’t have the strength to get up, but they spent that day chatting, remembering time past, just like they used to when everything was fine. Saladina asked her sister to tell her a story. ‘A story’ was always the same story: Once upon a time there was a man called the Taragoña Express, who was all skin and bone, with a long scraggly beard …

  ‘Like Jesus Christ,’ clarified Saladina.

  ‘Like Jesus Christ,’ continued Dolores, ‘who ran over forty kilometres a day, and when he ran through the villages the people would come out to greet him and—’

  ‘You forgot to say that he wore a loincloth.’

  ‘Well yes, that’s right … He only wore a loincloth and then one day—’

  ‘You also forgot to tell how he ran through the cornfields …’

  ‘Yes, through the cornfields and the tracks and the roads and the paths he would go, in the snow and the hail and the thunder and the pouring rain, in the scorching heat or in a storm until one day—’

  ‘No one has come by for a while,’ Saladina cut in suddenly.

  Dolores looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘To ask for their piece of paper, the contract for the brain …’

  Dolores went silent.

  ‘Do you think they found them?’

  Dolores the Winterling shrugged her shoulders.

  At lunchtime, Saladina ate again with gusto. ‘Too much gusto,’ Dolor
es said to herself as she took the tray back to the kitchen.

  That same afternoon, when Dolores bent down to tuck in her sister, Saladina pulled out her long, bony arms and wrapped them around her sister’s neck. She gave her a kiss, and, looking over her shoulder towards the sky, she asked if it was night yet.

  ‘No, why do you ask?’ said her sister.

  They stayed like that, watching the horizon, spellbound.

  The sky was darkened by thousands of birds of all sizes and colours: owls, chickens, and capons. Hooting and clucking, they beat their wings slowly, flying blindly with their necks stretched out. Guided by an ancestral and powerful feeling, the Winterlings’ chickens took flight as well, first clumsily and close to the ground, then calmly as they soared up to join the mass of birds that now floated over Bocelo Mountain, motionless.

  Further and further away.

  The next day, Saladina got up and swathed herself in blankets. She said that if the rubs had worked for her, they couldn’t do any harm to the cow. She went down to the cowshed with the rye bran and the pig fat, and spent a good while rubbing Greta Garbo’s shrunken stomach, the poor cow not having the strength to protest. Exhausted by the effort, she sat down afterwards by the hearth.

  Dolores, happy to see her on her feet, lit the fire and prepared her breakfast. Then Saladina asked her to tell her in detail how it had all gone in Tossa de Mar.

  ‘You really want to hear about that?’ asked Dolores. ‘Maybe … maybe it’s not the right time.’

  ‘Tell me!’ exclaimed Saladina.

  Swallowing bitter saliva, her face calm and exhausted, Saladina heard about all that Dolores had seen: the sea, the cameras, the lights, the costumes, the sets, the men. In the bay of Tossa, there was a headland on the beach itself, on which there was a little mediaeval citadel with seven circular towers. That’s where they were filming. The shooting of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman began at seven in the morning and didn’t finish until eight in the evening. The brightness was overwhelming, and for that reason, they had to put up black netting everywhere. They had been searching for doubles for over two weeks, and despite all the women they had seen and interviewed, they still hadn’t found anyone capable of doubling for the famous actress.